Yahoo EVP and head of North American operations, Hillary Schneider (Source: Yahoo)

Yahoo U.S. Audience head, David Ko (Source: Vietnam Net)

Yahoo Head of Media Jimmy Pitaro (Source: Forbes)

Issues for struggling search giant continue

Watching
Yahoo Inc. over the last several years has been like watching a
slowly sinking ship. Since September 2008 the company has
dropped from 9 percent search market share to just over 6.3 percent;
in the same time window Google jumped from 80.3 percent to 84.7
percent. Over the same time period, Yahoo has seen a steady
bleed of executives, including Chairman
Terry Semel, CEO
(and co-founder) Jerry Yang, and other
lesser executives.

According to a
report by Kara Swisher of All
Things Digital,
the company is in for another major round of executive losses.
Ms. Swisher reports that the resignations will include the North
American VP Hilary Schneider, U.S. Audience head David Ko, and VP
of Media Jimmy Pitaro.

According to the report, Yahoo
desperately wants to make the impending departures look like an
ouster, but in reality CEO
Carol Bartz was begging the departing executives to stay.
Reportedly part of the reason for the departure stems from issues
with the company's partnership
with Microsoft. The company brought in former Microsoft
Executive Blake Irving as its Vice President and Chief Products
Officer, and Mr. Irving in turn brought in many former Microsoft
engineers -- a move that clashed with Mr. Ko.

In an emergency
board meeting this week, the board reportedly discussed installing a
second in command to Carol Bartz, which might take over from her when
her 18 month current contract expires.

That's
hardly a vote of confidence, and it's a testament with shareholders'
growing frustration with Ms. Bartz's inability to improve the
situation and retain talent. Ms. Bartz has offended some
of Yahoo's key partners like Chinese
e-commerce site Alibaba with her remarks. Her failure
to prevent talent loss in the top ranks may be the straw that breaks
the camel's back, so to speak.

On the other hand if Ms. Bartz
leaves the company, Yahoo will have entered on a CEO carousel the
likes of which is rarely seen (except
at GM). Yahoo's fundamental problem seems to be that its
products -- Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo News, to name a few
-- are good, but are beat out by superior products in each sector
from Google.

In
short, there's many tough questions for Yahoo, and no one seems to
have answers.

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Google saves every single search you perform, from day 1 when their company was first formed. The last thing I'm going to do is trust their email and other online services. While I do use Google search, I would never use their email and other services.

When you perform searches using Google, make sure you are NOT logged on to any of their services. If you are, they will save every search you perform and log it under your username. If you have ever logged on to either Google or their subsidiary YouTube and you still wish to remain anonymous, you will need to delete all your cookies and your cache. I don't know what other sites Google owns so you would need to delete all your cookies and not selectively delete just your Google and YouTube cookies.